Profiles

Interview with Jason Clay of WWF at the 2009 Seafood Summit regarding the development of WWF’s Aquaculture Stewardship Council

Jason Clay is Senior Vice President, Market Transformation at World Wildlife Fund (WWF). Jason spoke with Seafood Choices’ Melanie Siggs at the 2009 Seafood Summit in San Diego, CA about the development of the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC).

Melanie (MS): Jason, you recently announced the development of something called the Aquaculture Stewardship Council and we’d really like to take this opportunity to hear from you what the Aquaculture Stewardship Council is going to be about and how that came to fruition.

Jason (JC): We launched the Aquaculture Stewardship Council after about 15 years of preparation, so this has been a very long birth for some of us. We’re interested in the development of credible standards and standards that can be used to evaluate and benchmark against other standards that are out there in play.

WWF started working on aquaculture in 1994 by comparing the effects of wild-caught shrimp with aquaculture shrimp and decided at that point, that the future of shrimp was actually aquaculture but it had to be better than it was at that time. We began to work on the development of understanding the key impacts, building consensus around that, developed a consortium with the World Bank, the FAO, NACA and World Wildlife Fund to really look at, through about 45 case studies, the key impacts of aquaculture globally, what could be done to improve them, etc. Since then, we’ve started looking at salmon and tilapia and a dozen other species and are in the process of developing standards for them, so the clear question is: what happens with all these standards of better practices and standards of performance that we’re creating?

WWF has a history not only of developing standards and certification programs but of then spinning them off and putting them out into the world—the Forest Stewardship Council, the Marine Stewardship Council, the Marine Aquarium Council and now a number of agricultural standards are being developed by WWF, so this is really no different.

For the last six to eight years, we have monitored the other aquaculture programs that are out there – we recently completed a review of 30 different aquaculture standards – and we basically decided that we think the bar is not high enough, not just in terms of performance but in terms of how standards are created, how credible they are, how transparent they are, how multi-stakeholder they are, how they’re verified, etc. And we think there is a real market niche for coming out with credible standards that will tap into markets, particularly in Europe and the US, that want to support more sustainable aquaculture. As an organization though, we think that certification is probably the tip of the iceberg. The real benefits of working on aquaculture is to shift the bottom, not the top and so our goal will also to be to find ways to increase or improve performance of some of the worse producers because that is where we actually get the greatest environmental gains on the ground. So we’re very interested in step-wise approaches and using networks of buyers and sellers to bring together people and help move them towards better practices and to undertake baseline studies and benchmark different companies against them so they know where they stand and know how to actually improve their practices. So we see the launch of the ASC as just one part of the overall strategy.

MS: Would you like to tell us a little more about where we are with the dialogues and the timeline for the outcomes of standards?

JC: We have eight aquaculture dialogues that are moving forward at this point in time, the last one on trout, which is coordinated out of Europe, will be the last one before we launch the ASC. There’s interest in beginning some others after the ASC is started, but for the time being, we want to finish off the ones that we’ve started. This will probably happen…we’ve got three that are already in draft: tilapia, bivalves and pangasius.

We think by early 2010 we’ll have another two in draft and by end of 2010 we should have them all and so that would be when they would be launched into a formal ASC in 2011. Our thinking was that we didn’t want to launch a single standard like shrimp two or three years ago when actually had done a lot of work on it through the consortium, but rather we wanted to launch a bundle of standards so that anybody who buys seafood would be able to buy all the seafood they buy from those particular…from certified products. We are concerned that the standards that are being developed all be available and that companies will buy into more than if there is just one of them.

We are also interested in using the standards in a way that’s different from a lot of the other certification programs to date and that is, we would like our standards to be added on to health and safety standards, as an environmental standard. So we’re currently developing MOUs with GlobalGAP and FMI (in particular, Food Marketing Institute’s SQF program) to have health and safety+ programs. We recently developed a partnership with GlobalGAP, which has agreed to supplement its existing food safety, environmental and social requirements with the metrics-based environmental and social standards under development by the Aquaculture Dialogues.

MS: Could you just tell us what GlobalGAP and FMI/ SQF are for those who might not know?

JC: Both of these groups have been created by retailers to help reduce or eliminate food health and safety issues and to help harmonize standards across a number of different systems. We’re working with the Food Marketing Institute to help them figure out how to address environmental issues in their SQF—quality assurance program – that they’re working on with food retailers, mostly in the US. If this work goes forward, it would be SQF+ when it includes any of the Aquaculture Dialogue standards that we’ve developed. Similarly, we’ve just signed an MOU with GlobalGAP to do a similar kind of program with them, where if people are certified to GlobalGAP and ASC standards, then they would be GlobalGAP+. We see this as a way to get immediate market penetration into some markets – particularly in Europe – that are not having very much penetration from aquaculture certification, and in the US we see it as a way to up the ante. There’s also, I think, a real concern in the US – at least with the retailers that we’re talking to – that the bar may be set a little too low and that a lot of the grocery stores, retail stores, even some of the brands would like seafood that is not necessarily the quality that would be acceptable to a Wal-Mart for example.

MS: You mentioned that you were going to sign an MOU with GlobalGAP and I wondered, is that different to the MOU that GAA [Global Aquaculture Alliance] have signed?

JC: Well, I think the difference is that what we’re talking about with the board of GlobalGAP is actually having the producers be certified both against GlobalGAP standards and against ASC standards—the two not being the same. I think what GlobalGAP and ACC [Aquaculture Certification Council] have agreed to is a harmonization of the process for certification so that there is an elimination of the redundancy of the cost. So that it’s not a question of GlobalGAP and ACC standards being part and parcel the same thing, GlobalGAP would not be accepting ACC as the plus in their equation.

MS: And do you think in the future, once ASC is established, there might be any scope to introduce other areas of certification, like maybe something around carbon or social issues, or you mentioned food safety and quality?

JC: I think that the ASC will start with what we focused on to date in all the dialogues, and those environmental issues as well as social issues. They’re not “fair trade” per se, but there are social criteria in each of the standards that are being developed. Our goal is that every three to five years – and we have to figure out the exact details of this – the standards will be reviewed and they will be changed based on technology that is available, better practices that are known, performances that we know can be achieved. That is also a time when we would look to do what we need to address GHG (green house gases) and carbon issues more, do we need to address fair trade and social issues more, are there other things that we should be paying attention to that we haven’t?

MS: So review the general offering around that time, and can you tell us who is involved in the development of ASC and whether you’re looking for more partners and support in that?

JC: Well, the ASC at this point is still a…We’ve launched the intent, not the entity. The intent, basically, is to plant the flag in the ground and say we’re going to do this and it’s a flag that a lot of people can get around, we think. Anybody who is genuinely interested in raising the standards of aquaculture production and having performance-based standards we would welcome to the table as supporters, as partners, in whatever capacity they would choose. We’re starting of course with all the different entities, hundreds of entities, that have been involved in all the different roundtables because they are logical partners in this effort, but there’s also a lot of other companies and donors and other people that have not been involved that could potentially be involved in the future. So we don’t have a specific group of people that we’re working with, we’re in discussions with several, we have to figure out what the types of organizations are that should be involved and which ones need, because of conflict of interest or appearance of impropriety, need to be at arms length or not involved at all.

What makes certification strategies move from niche to transformative is having market share, and so in all of our dialogues – we’re involved in 16, not just aquaculture – we have anywhere from 10 to 30 percent of global market share at the table saying they want the standards. We’ve got anywhere from 10 to 50 percent of global production of a given commodity at the table saying we’ll produce against the standard. So we’re confident that there will be glitches and it will take longer and it’ll be slower and all this kind of stuff, but in general we think that we have a…we’ve positioned ourselves to really to move fairly quickly into some of these markets and in a way, and with a business strategy, that allows us to use the market to change something, to create the momentum for change. This is unusual. I mean, organics, after 35 years is 0.7 of the global food market, so the numbers we’re talking about of people who are engaging with us is quite phenomenal. I mean, just to give you one example, IKEA is the 13th largest restaurant chain in the world, they sell salmon as one of their three things they sell in every restaurant of theirs around the world. They buy 1% of the world’s salmon; it’s all from aquaculture. They’ve required all of their buyers to be part—or sellers to be part – of the salmon dialogues and to be certified within five years of when those standards come out.

MS: So that’s a good example of how a stakeholder is getting engaged in that process, and if you were to identify a way in which you would ask any viewer of this interview to become involved in and help move forward that production of the ASC and the outcomes for the dialogues, what would that be?

JC: Open doors for us. Help us find the right people to get engaged. Help us identify issues that are going to bite us if we don’t address them. You know, we want to make new mistakes, we don’t want to make any mistakes that people have already made, so lessons learned would be greatly important, but I think one of the things that our strategy is a little bit different about is that we don’t think consumers ought to have choices about these issues. We think that there should only be good products on the shelf and if you take that position than we don’t need to change the way 6.7 billion consumers buy their products, we need to change the way three to five hundred companies buy the products that consumers have in front of them because three to five hundred companies buy 70 to 80 percent of the commodities that are traded globally, and 100 companies buy 50 percent of them and about 25 companies buy 25 percent of these commodities, so it’s not a huge number of players. Will they be part of the ASC and help create it and do all that? I doubt it. I don’t think it’s necessarily appropriate and besides if we learned one thing from the MSC it’s that if you have a single company that’s involved in a certification program, others don’t want to be involved because that one tends to dominate it. We’d like to keep a little more arms length from those types of groups.

MS: And tell me, where is the ASC going to be based? Do you know, yet?

JC: I don’t know where the ASC is going to be based. We’re going to be determining that; I think there’s some key places that may be logical. Clearly, the ASC and the, I think, the strength of the environmental-based standards is going to have a strong appeal in Europe, so that would be a logical place. There’s also in some ways less direct competition in Europe, so it would be a place to move forward and there’s a lot of European governments that see the ASC as way to support development work all over the world with small-scale producers around aquaculture but no, we don’t have anything lined up. We’re open to suggestions. We’re open to being influenced.

MS: Is your plan to create some sort of group to discuss these things?

JC: We’re going to create a process through which we will vet decisions like this, also business plans and strategies over the next year and a half. Our goal would be that within a year and a half we’d have kind of the planning finalized and then within two years it would actually be launched. It’ll take about two years to finish the standards that we’re working on, so handing them all off into a new organization makes a lot of sense to us.

MS: One final question, here at the Seafood Summit, in San Diego this year, can you share with us, what’s been your experience at the Summit? What will you be taking away from it?

JC: Well, it’s funny, I haven’t been to a Seafood Summit since Rhode Island, which is a long time ago and at the Rhode Island meeting I stopped going because of the way the meeting was run. It was about 90 NGOs and about 10 non-NGOs and when the NGOs wanted to talk about things they would kick the companies out of the room. We’ve come a long way since then. To me that was not the appropriate way; we needed to be engaging with those that we want to work with, and we needed to be engaging with them about science and content and changes that are possible from a business point of view, not just theoretical or ideological discussions. They need to be ground-truthing the strategies. Not necessarily all of them, but there has to be space for creating partnerships in public, not just behind closed doors. So, what has struck me about this meeting is that there have been very open and frank discussions. I think there are some hard realities that we’re going to have to deal with, in terms of what’s the future of seafood in the world. I don’t see it being fisheries. I see it as totally being about aquaculture. If it’s going to be a good future, than we’ve got to make sure that the impacts of aquaculture somehow aren’t as bad as the impacts of poor fisheries management, but right now all things are possible.

Interview took place February 2009
Posted November 2009

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